Although she has lived abroad most of her life, Gaza is where journalist and activist Laila El-Haddad calls home. Growing up, and as an adult, she would visit Gaza to spend time with her extended family. She also spent years reporting on the region for Al-Jazeera. During that time, she launched the blog Gaza Mom, which she eventually turned into a book of the same name. In 2012, she co-wrote the cookbook The Gaza Kitchen, which was republished a few years ago in an updated third edition.
More recently, El-Haddad wrote an essay for Saveur — "A Cuisine Under Siege" — about keeping her family's recipes alive, as well as an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times about trying to find solace during Ramadan.
Laila El-Haddad launched the blog Gaza Momand co-wrote the cookbook "The Gaza Kitchen." Photo courtesy of Laila El-Haddad.
Evan Kleiman: Tell us a bit about your family background. Where are your parents and grandparents from?
Laila El Haddad: My parents are both from Gaza, born and raised in Gaza City and southern Gaza's town of Khan Yunis, respectively. My mother's maternal grandfather was Circasian, who was part of a persecuted group of Muslims from Sochi, and he married my great grandmother who herself was Kurdish from Damascus. They had my grandmother who was born in Palestine. My parents both met in Gaza, as newly minted doctors after finishing medical school, got married there and eventually moved, first to England and then to the Gulf, to Kuwait, and then to Saudi Arabia.
Where were you born? And where did you grow up?
I was born in Kuwait, though I don't remember it much. I only spent a few months of my life there before my parents then moved to Saudi Arabia, where they worked as physicians in the town of Dhahran, in the eastern part of the country. That's where I was largely raised while summering in Gaza. We would commute back there on a yearly basis to see our family and renew our residency documents and so on, since we only had Palestinian documents.
Where did you end up living as an adult? Did you come to the US for college?
I did. I came here when I was 18. I finished high school in Bahrain. Then I came to study in North Carolina. I went to Duke and continued that journey of going back and forth until I finally decided to move back to Gaza with my young son in 2003.
Where are you living now?
Right now, I'm in Maryland, about 40 minutes away from Washington DC.
One of Laila El-Haddad's aunts, known as Um Fida, prepares maftoul, the Palestinian version of couscous. Photo courtesy of Laila El-Haddad.
After leaving Gaza, how did your family maintain a connection to the place?
I don't think they thought too intentionally about it, honestly. Especially in the '70s and '80s, it was a time when a lot of Palestinians, especially Palestinian professionals, were being recruited by these young countries in the Gulf. Palestinians had the highest rate of education in the region, so you had doctors, engineers and others all going in masses to the Gulf. I think their main concern was about raising their families, securing their children's futures.
Most of us were stateless. Some people managed to get foreign passports but the overwhelming majority of the Palestinian community was stateless and, at best, might have had temporary travel documents or the like. Many of them even got a little too comfortable and lost their ability to return to Palestine, not by their own choosing but Israel made it extremely difficult for Palestinians who might have been living abroad to retain their residency status through a permit that they issue called hawiya or an identity document. At that point in time, if you didn't renew the hawiya on a regular basis, it would be withdrawn from you and you immediately lost your ability to return, to visit, to reside in your own home. That happened to a lot of Palestinians who happened to be working abroad in 1967, when Israel formally occupied the Gaza strip in the West Bank.
For my parents, their main concern was retaining their residency in Palestine, raising their family, and securing their futures. It was really difficult and I think the burden does fall on the parents but they were both working professionals who didn't have much time to think about how they might teach us our own history. Every now and then, there was a cultural event. We would put on our embroidered dresses. We would certainly go and visit. That was very important to them. That was something I'm very grateful that my mother made sure to do. A lot of other families either didn't put much time or thought into it or weren't very intentional about it. But she insisted that we had to make this really perilous, daunting and torturous journey every year, back to Palestine. As kids, you don't fully appreciate that.
To describe it a little bit, we'd have to go across the land crossing from Jordan into Palestine. This would take more than 24 hours. We would be made to wait by the Israeli soldiers in buses for hours on end in the middle of the summer heat. We would then be separated, men and women, strip-searched, be told to take off our shoes and our socks, they would be thrown into large piles that we would then be told in large groups to go and retrieve while we were still naked. Those kinds of experiences don't encourage someone, especially a child... you don't associate going back home with any pleasant memories because of that. But [my mother] kept insisting we have to do this, we have to go back, this is your country, these are your family. Again, it's only when you grow and mature, you begin to appreciate and understand that despite all of the odds and all these Israeli policies that were very much intending to make this journey home as uncomfortable and unpleasant as possible, she insisted that we had to go back
As a child, Laila El-Haddad and her father would go fishing. What they caught was often turned into sayadieh, a fish and rice dish. Photo courtesy of Laila El-Haddad.
Did food help connect you to your Palestinian identity and attenuate the feeling of disconnection?
Yes, absolutely. I don't think that was something my parents necessarily thought of at the time. My mother cooked because she had to but she was very busy. She noticed that I really enjoyed being in the kitchen and enjoyed cooking and she certainly encouraged that. She was certainly cooking the foods that were familiar, especially to my father, who was from Gaza City. Even in a place as small as the Gaza Strip, which is just twice the size of Washington, DC., there is a lot of regional and micro-regional variation in the food.
Some of my earliest memories are of going fishing with my father, not in Gaza but off the eastern province of Saudi Arabia. We would fish for grouper and crabs and then we would go home and he would show me how they prepared the crabs in Gaza growing up, how he made them — something with which my mother was wholly unfamiliar. She would show me how they would make sayadieh of fish and rice with the grouper that we would catch. My father would show me how to clean the crabs and stuff them with mashed garlic, cumin, chili peppers, parsley and olive oil, and then you would either roast them in the oven or grill them. That was certainly one of my earliest food-related memories. I remember thinking God, this is amazing, but I didn't know anyone else who knew how to make crabs this way. It's funny because I live in Maryland now, which is, of course, famous for its blue crabs. I like to joke that there's some kind of parallel in terms of where I now reside and where I'm from, in terms of the love of crabs.
Dagga, the quintessential Gazan salad made with chilies, dill, tomatoes, and olive oil, is often prepared and served in a zibdiya. Photo courtesy of Laila El-Haddad.
Can you describe either a flavor palate or a particular set of techniques that distinguishes Gazan cooking as a distinct subset of Palestinian cuisine?
I would say that some of the most familiar ingredients or, as you said, flavor palate, is the use of cumin, chili peppers, garlic and dill seeds. You see this combination in a large majority of the dishes there. In terms of the technique, it's the use of the unglazed clay mortar and lemonwood pestle known as the zibdiya. The clay mortar itself is known as the zibdiya. It's ubiquitous. You'll see it in every household — urban, rural, rich or poor. In fact, it was one of the only items that now, in the modern day, Palestinians who are being forcibly displaced from their homes are taking with them. I'm seeing it in a lot of social media reels. People in tents and sometimes besides the mattresses and maybe a small backpack, the only other thing they'll have with them is a zibdiya.
Gaza has a long and ancient history of pottery-making but the use of the zibdiya is pretty unique in Palestinian cuisine. It's not only [used] to coarsely grind spices, like dill seed, in a circular motion until it's fragrant and you smell those essential oils, it's also used to mash things like garlic and green chili peppers. To that is added lemon juice to make this essential dressing that's put in lentil soup and rice and chicken dishes and so on.
The zibdiya is also used to bake in. So it's used to prep ingredients to serve in, to serve salads like the quintessential Gazan salad dagga, which is chili peppers, dill seeds, fresh dill, and super overripe tomatoes, all slathered with olive oil. It's also used to cook in. There's a really famous tomato-based shrimp stew called zibdiyat gambari, literally shrimps in a clay pot or a bowl, that is cooked in this mortar and then served in it, as well.
Food has such a sense-memory for most of us and, as you write, in your heartbreaking Saveur essay, Gazan food, for you, is closely associated with your aunt, whom you call Um Hani. Tell us about her and what role she played as you went back and forth to visit in Gaza, and a little bit about the foods that she served you and maybe she taught you.
Growing up, I'd spend a lot of my time in Gaza, in my mother's hometown of Khan Yunis, visiting her family members, staying with my grandfather and grandmother. We would only make brief visits to the city, which was about 40 minutes away, to see my father's family. Whenever we would do that, the first person to come and see us was Um Hani, my aunt. She would always come bearing one of my father's favorite dishes, either maftoul, which is the hand-rolled Palestinian version of couscous that is particularly well known in Gaza and kind of cumbersome to make for families living a more modern lifestyle, or sumagiyya, which is what I wrote about in that article. It is another quintessentially Gaza City dish that is usually made around this time, the end of Ramadan, and to celebrate the Eid holiday. It's a stew of fork-tender lamb cooked with chard and flavored with dill seeds, chili peppers, garlic, and cumin, thickened with a roasted red sesame tahina, and infused with what a sumac tea or water (boiled, whole sumac berries or ground sumac). It gives it a pinkish, ruby hue. It's poured into bowls and usually distributed to family and friends and neighbors. She would always come with a bowl of that when she came to visit us.
It wasn't until I had a chance to spend a more significant time in Gaza and go back and do the fieldwork for my book, The Gaza Kitchen, in 2010, that I had a chance to sit down with her for many hours and record a very long interview with her in which she showed me and my co-author how to make a variety of dishes. There was a lot of banter and conversation about the things that my grandmother liked and pictures of them in what must have been the 1950s or 1960s. And then I just archived it. We had it transcribed. We used it for the purposes of the book and we referred back to it every now and then when we were coming out with a new addition but beyond that, it was archived. It wasn't until I received the news that she was killed in an Israeli airstrike along with her two daughters, my cousins, and her eldest son and his wife, who was actually Croatian, that was the first thing I thought about.
I was having a conversation with my aunt's youngest granddaughter, who is in Austria. She lost her mother, her father, her two aunts, and the grandmother, my aunt who raised her, so I immediately was trying to problem-solve and find a way to help my surviving cousin cope and I thought of this interview. I dug it up and started to pore through it. Suddenly, all of these seemingly trivial details took on new meaning, and I was so thankful that I had this interview, to not only share with my cousin but to hear myself.
I kept thinking, I wish I had taken something with me from that house. I wish I had taken the pictures or done a better job of listening rather than interrupting. But it was Ramadan at the time, there was a heatwave, it was maybe 110 degrees, it was almost time to break our fast, there was no electricity because of the Israeli attack at the time on the power plant and the restrictions on fuel. You can imagine, it was extreme conditions under which we were operating, so I didn't have much patience for anything further.
We had spent several hours and she said to me, "Why don't I show you how to make sumagiyya the way that your grandmother made it?" I was like, "No, no, another time." I thought I knew it all. I had a skeletal version of the recipe already. That's my one regret, because, as I say in the article, another time never came, and I wished I had taken the time to say, "I would love to hear from you how she made it" or "maybe you can show me how she made it."
Gaza City is known for sumagiyya, a lamb stew with dill, chilies, garlic, cumin, red tahina, and sumac. Photo courtesy of Laila El-Haddad.
As a food show, we look at the world through the lens of food. But what we've seen in Gaza is food becoming a weapon of starvation. It's hard not to feel like cuisine is trivial in light of the suffering we're witnessing. Can you talk about why it's important for you, even amid such horror, to keep these recipes alive?
I get asked that question a lot, and I think about it a lot because food is one of the ways in which I understand the world around me and the way that I have certainly spent a lot of my time and my effort and work trying to share the story of Gaza and help people understand Gaza through this lens. We had said before, in the introduction to our book many years ago, and unfortunately, this still holds true, that it seemed frivolous, at the time, to write a cookbook about Gaza, given all of the unimaginable horrors that it was enduring and being subjected to. That feeling has increased tenfold in the past 10 months. It leaves you struggling.
Even as I am celebrating Ramadan with my own family, every night, I tell them I don't even want them to waste a morsel of food. Of course, it's getting a little old for them. We know, we know, in Gaza, our relatives. I'm like, I know but I just It's unfathomable that this could be happening, in this day and age, at this scale, this fast.
I think for all those reasons, it's all the more important to be able to understand and speak about food not only as a weapon of war but as a tool of resistance and steadfastness and connection to the land, certainly the way that Palestinians have always understood it, and I think other marginalized and in even not marginalized communities. I recently had an event in the Oakland area with indigenous chefs, African American chefs, myself, and another Palestinian chef, and we all shared commonalities and stories of how our ancestors have used food as tools of resistance.